In photographs, Tamara Mellon towers like a pair of $900 studded stiletto gladiator sandals. Snapped for Vanity Fair striding down a London street with girlishly long hair streaming over her stylish collar, or dominating red carpet shots in Stella McCartney or Lanvin, the former shopgirl who founded Jimmy Choo 13 years ago exudes unshakable confidence and outrageous brio. Staring down the lens with an enigmatic smile, generous cleavage, understated jewels, and boundless ambition, she is the apotheosis of her customers—or at least of their dreams.

But on a rainy summer afternoon over cappuccino in a midtown Manhattan trattoria, Mellon, in her early forties, shocks with her delicacy. At 5'6" and 115 pounds, dressed in skinny jeans and a featherweight leather jacket, she is more sparrow than Amazon, despite her ever-present five-inch heels. Her blue eyes are wide and watchful, her slender hands with black-violet lacquered nails never quite at rest. Over the years, the tabloid press has described her as "steely," "controlled," "man-hungry," and "aggressive," but today Mellon's vulnerabilities are as clear as her complexion. "I've learned a lot in the past few years," she says, her posh accented voice unexpectedly soft, "but really, when you look back at it all at once, it does seem pretty horrendous."

That's an understatement. Despite her triumph in turning the global love affair with pricey designer shoes into a $300 million luxury juggernaut, the recent past has been so tumultuous it would make Danielle Steel shake her mane in disbelief. First, in April 2004, Mellon's adored father, Tom Yeardye, a former backer of Vidal Sassoon's empire who provided the original financing for Jimmy Choo and who was chairman of the company, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. The following year, there was the much-publicized divorce from Matthew Mellon, the wild-living scion of the Pittsburgh banking family, which culminated in Matthew being tried for conspiring to hack into her computer (he was cleared of the charges). In 2007, she had to wrest control of the company from her then-CEO Robert Bensoussan, who'd tried to sell it out from under her. Last March, as Jimmy Choo and other top brands were battered by the worldwide economic collapse, Mellon's 18- month relationship with the actor Christian Slater—which followed brief liaisons with such bad boys as Kid Rock and Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild—dissolved, its demise accompanied throughout cyberspace by pictures of her frolicking topless with Slater months earlier on a Caribbean beach.

And the tough times aren't over: In November, she is set to square off in a Los Angeles courtroom against her mother, Anne Yeardye, a 70-year-old former Chanel model, over several million dollars' worth of shares of Jimmy Choo that Mellon contends were mistakenly deposited in her mother's trust in the wake of a private equity deal that closed right after her father's death. "People look at what they see of my life and think they know me," she says, "but they don't know anything other than the public part of me. The truth is that we all have lives that are complicated. We all get hurt by people we love sometimes. It's laughable to believe that anyone is immune. The important thing is how you behave. Times like these either make you stronger or they destroy you."

Mellon has no intention of going down. On the contrary, she has begun anew— in New York. Several months ago, with her seven-year-old daughter, Araminta ("Minty"), in tow, she moved to Manhattan, remaining as president and public face of the company, but trading her sprawling 5,000-square-foot apartment in London's tony Holland Park for an equally grand Fifth Avenue duplex. She has carved out an elegant beige-and-chrome corner for herself in the company's twenty-second-floor offices across from Bloomingdale's venerable flagship, leaving Sandra Choi, the longtime creative director, in London.

The move made sense not just because 50 percent of Jimmy Choo's sales come from the United States, but also because Mellon realized she "no longer had any family in London, no roots at all." With her father gone and relations with her mother and two younger brothers in deep freeze (Daniel, 36, and Gregory, 39, are supported by trust funds and have sided with their mother in the legal battle), she wanted Minty to feel more connected to Matthew's side of the tree. Matthew's uncle Jay Mellon, who has three daughters, lives just a few blocks down Fifth Avenue, and Minty is able to spend time with Matthew's mother in Palm Beach and at the family compound in Maine. "Watching her run around with her cousins is worth everything," she says.

Moving to New York may make it easier for her daughter to stay connected, but Mellon herself will have little time for socializing. Jimmy Choo offers six full collections a year, and the weakened economy seems only to have sharpened her focus on the brand. She won't detail how sales have been hobbled, but she concedes that these are challenging times. "Any luxury company that claims not to be hurt by this is lying," she says. Thus far she's seen an interesting trend: Sales of exotic high-end styles ($900) and "entry-level" flats and sandals ($400) have remained strong. The weak link has been the midrange basics such as lessadorned pumps and slingbacks, which used to cushion profits. Handbag sales, which represent 40 percent of Jimmy Choo's revenue, have followed a similar trajectory. "People are pickier now," she says. "Instead of buying multiples, they tend to splurge on something really spectacular."

With her business no longer expanding exponentially, Mellon may have to ramp up her already busy travel schedule, which regularly takes her to the Far East and India. But she intends to stay on the board of Revlon, to which she was appointed in August 2008. This summer, however, she quietly resigned from the board of Halston and has given up her role as chief consultant to the brand, though it was she who persuaded movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and some other money types to invest in the longfallow label just over two years ago. (Insiders say Mellon lost patience with investors, who had trouble settling on a designer or a management structure. [In May of this year, Marios Schwab was appointed Creative Director.] Mellon says only that Jimmy Choo required all of her attention.) She has remained an investor.

Making such decisive changes without looking back is second nature to Mellon, which may be why she seems undaunted by the prospect of beginning anew in New York. Despite her image as the consummate insider, she has, in fact, spent much of her life on the other side of the glass. When she was eight, her father moved the family to L.A., where Sassoon was operating, and she navigated the shoals of preteen life in Beverly Hills. When they returned to London five years later, she wrestled with the city's class-conscious social scene, ever aware that despite his wealth, her father, who had started as a stuntman linked romantically to the British actress Diana Dors, was distinctly nouveau riche. "She was too English in L.A. and too L.A. by the time she got back to London," says Vassi Chamberlain, an editor-at-large for Tatler, who is among her oldest friends. Riding London's cultural and fashion explosion of the late 1980s, she eschewed university in favor of the same Swiss finishing school attended by Princess Diana; sold Alaïa at Browns, a well-known designer boutique; and then became an accessories editor at British Vogue. As one of the city's original It Girls, in 1998 (after the requisite stint in rehab) she met the man she recognized immediately as her way to financial independence and social status: Choo, a Malaysian-born bespoke shoemaker operating out of a workshop in London's seedy East End. "I always knew I wanted to make my own way; I never wanted to be dependent on my father," she says. "That notion was really repellent to me."

As the corporate story goes, within a year she'd persuaded her father to put up £150,000 (roughly $250,000) to take on Manolo Blahnik, the leader of the cult of designer footwear, with a ready-to-wear collection under Choo's name. (Choo was later bought out, acrimoniously, with backing from Phoenix Equity, the first of three private investment funds the company has been owned by.) The rest—the courtship of celebrities that led to Jimmy Choos on every red carpet; multiple mentions on Sex and the City that elevated the brand to icon status; the expansion of boutiques, 100 and counting, from Madison Avenue to Mumbai—is now part of retail lore.

Mellon's complexity and elusiveness are also part of the tale. At times, the collision of toughness and fragility makes her almost heartbreaking. At a pre-Oscar luncheon she hosted in February at the newly opened L.A. restaurant Cecconi's, she navigated the room with a practiced air, yet her eyes darted about like a fawn seeking refuge. Between embraces with Choo-shod fans and well-wishers, including the actresses Debra Messing and Elizabeth Banks, she exchanged searching looks with staff members sprinkled around the room. "The truth is, I'm shattered from too much traveling and staying out late last night," she whispered. "Luckily, I've had a lot of experience pulling it together like this."

"Tamara," noted Banks, as she watched Mellon wade into a group that included the designer Valentino and Elton John, "is fascinating to watch. She draws everyone's attention, but at the same time, she doesn't eat up all the air in the room."

Cavorting with celebrities and maintaining her stature as one of them has made Mellon a wealthy woman, but it was her 2007 fight to retain control of the company that finally convinced her, deep down, that she had arrived. The episode, in which Bensoussan, who'd been hired to run the company when Tom Yeardye was alive and who owned a big chunk of Jimmy Choo, stealthily found a new private equity partner to edge Mellon out, initially drove home how much she missed her father's guidance. But with all the makings of a financial thriller— Lion Capital, the private equity fund that owned most of the company, gave Mellon two weeks to find her own backing to beat the roughly $300 million offer Bensoussan had put together—the battle helped her "understand the depth of my abilities as a financial force as well as a creative force." Virtually overnight she marshaled preliminary commitments from the Saad Group, a Saudi investment and development firm. Her friends were amazed, not merely at the feat itself, but at Mellon's calm. "We were on the beach at St. Barts when she got the call about what Robert was planning," Chamberlain recalled, "and she suddenly had to go into full-attack mode. Watching her work the phone—it was magnificent."

In the end, the triumph was even sweeter than Mellon anticipated. She didn't need the Saudis because TowerBrook, the firm Bensoussan had lined up, decided it wanted to back Mellon instead. Jimmy Choo, they realized, was nothing without the creativity and the image of the woman who had given birth to it. "Tamara held her own with all the investment bankers; it was hard not to be impressed by the way she handled herself," says Filippo Cardini, the TowerBrook partner who put the deal together. Bensoussan cashed in his stake and resigned. "All my life, people have underestimated me," says Mellon, who helped hire Joshua Schulman from Kenneth Cole as Jimmy Choo's new CEO in 2007. "They think you're just a nice girl who couldn't possibly know how things should be run."

These days, when Mellon isn't working, she makes every effort to be at home with Minty in the duplex overlooking Central Park. She tries hard not to be away on business more than three nights in a row, often flying to the Far East or L.A. on a breakneck schedule. Minty, a delicate girl with an aristocratic forehead and Harry Potter glasses, can often be found during awards season in the hotel suites full of shoes that her mother has made de rigueur for stars and the stylists who dress them. In February, as Freida Pinto chose peep-toe platforms for Britain's version of the Oscars in the comfort of Claridge's, Minty sipped tea and nibbled a watercress sandwich, looking up at her mother with adoring eyes. "My mother and I never got along, not even when I was a child," Mellon says wistfully. Anne, she says, a famous beauty, was threatened by Tamara's closeness with her father and jealous of her daughter's success. "She wanted to be me, I think, which seems terribly sad."

The pending legal action against her mother has been more traumatic than any business challenge, Mellon admits. The suit goes back to the 2004 sale of Jimmy Choo, which had just begun when Tom Yeardye died. Because Anne Yeardye would agree to the deal only if she got cash for the stake she inherited, Mellon was compelled to take more of her proceeds in stock, some of which then wound up in her mother's offshore trust. Mellon says it was an accounting error, but Yeardye has refused to return the shares, even rejecting a suggestion that they be put in trust for Minty, Mellon says.

"I think that what's happening with Anne has wounded Tamara deeply," Chamberlain says. "The thing with Robert was bad, but that was business. This is blood. This is her mother. She can't imagine how Anne would do this. I don't know if she'll ever get over it." (In a statement to ELLE, Anne Yeardye's lawyer says, "Anne does not bear any animus toward Tamara. She would like more than anything to see this not go to court.")

The other blow from which Mellon is reeling is the breakup with Slater, whom she'd met through a friend. "She has always liked cute guys, and this time she found one who was also nice and tender," Chamberlain says. The relationship was doomed by distance, her confidants say (Slater, who is divorced with two children, lives in L.A.), as well as by the complications of too many assistants and hangers-on. "It's so difficult to achieve real intimacy when you have so many people in your lives," says Mellon, her voice tinged with regret. "It breeds misunderstanding and confusion."

Still, Mellon remains deeply romantic. She shudders at the suggestion that it might be time for her to settle down with a nice, steady, older mogul. "I just can't see myself as a trophy wife," she says. "I can't imagine not having my own life." But she is adamant that her days of falling for adorable, troubled boys are over. "It's taken me a long time, but I've finally accepted that I'm not going to fix someone. Even if it were possible, which it's not, I can't afford it. I have a daughter and a business to look after."

She might even one day have a second business to obsess over, as she considers rolling out a full ready-to-wear line under her own name. In any case, Mellon is confident the label will ride out the turbulent economy. This fall, she and Choi (who is actually Jimmy Choo's niece) are focused on projects that harness the socially responsible zeitgeist, including Project PEP, a collection anchored by a limited-edition graffiti print (25 percent of the net sales go to the Elton John AIDS Foundation), with flip-flops for $95— Jimmy Choo's first product offering under $100. In November, H&M will debut a selection of Jimmy Choo shoes and boots priced between $50 and $300.

Introducing less expensive items is risky; Jimmy Choo's allure has always been its exclusivity. To preserve the mystique, Mellon doesn't intend to lower prices on the core collections; instead, the label will introduce more casual entry-level styles, including flats. Such strategies are part of managing the brand for the long term, a new challenge for a company that has in the past had little chance to catch its breath. Like Mellon herself, Jimmy Choo has matured, it seems. "What I've realized lately is that the key to success is to maintain your standards and your sense of innovation, even in a downtime," she says. "You look to make things that will entice a new generation of customers to fall in love with you. You don't let bad news get in your way."